Miami: Ones I Liked, Part One

This is the first of what will probably be three or four posts on art I saw in Miami. This one will cover artists who were substantially new to me. The artists are listed in no particular order (OK, there is a particular order: making the images fit onto the page nice and purty-like.)

Paul Kennedy at Grimm Rosenfeld: As I've noted in several recent posts, there is a the-world-is-falling-apart/ being-destroyed meme running through much recent art. (Which reminds me of the 1970s, but that's another story.) Kennedy's photographs of a Tennessee home being destroyed to make room for a chain motel not only fits the trend, but does so with an elegance that you won't find in, say, Adam Cvijanovic's paintings. I feel like Kennedy respects the building and its past in these photographs, and something about that embrace of history -- even as it is being demolished -- is touching. Kennedy's work was the best photography I saw in any of the fairs.

Dan Holdsworth at Store (UK): Just as some of David Maisel's work brings color to William Garnett's pioneering aerial photography, Dan Holdsworth's photographs reminded me of colorful Lewis Baltzes. Sure, there are differences, but click here. The series of photographs of California scenes that Store had in Miami reminded me how much the Golden State is perpetually interested in how it presents itself.

Jaq Chartier at, well, about five different galleries: Chartier's paintings of slightly curving, vibrating, repeated lines on a white background look like painted DNA sequences.

Leandro Erlich at Nogueras Blanchard: Erlich's photographs of people above what appeared to be a swimming pool looking down at people looking up from what appeared to be under a swimming pool, while the people under the swimming pool were looking up at the people above the swimming pool, was as wonderfully disorienting as it sounds. How do we see things, how do people see us? And is that process factual? Or honest?

David Hamill at Bank: Mixing graphite and watercolor on paper, Hammil makes what feel like architectural abstractions. Except I can't find any real architectural references in any of the drawings. And I think there's landscape there too.

Ann Diener at Bank: Diener's drawings seem like they're about to spiral out of control, right off the page, but a mysterious tension holds them together. I wonder what lies inside the Bontecou-like holes in the drawings.

Mark Danielson at Howard House: Lots of artists appear to be reading Dwell magazine and playing with modernist architectural forms, including Danielson. In his paintings, modernist structures hover on flat planes of color, on top of or surrounded by simple references to the natural world. In one painting a home hovers above what looks like magma emerging through the earth's crust.